The Sunday Read: ‘The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In September 2021, a group of female minority students at Arizona State University confronted two white male students who were studying in the library’s multicultural center. The women were upset with what they saw as blatant antagonism: One of the men sported a “Didn’t Vote for Biden” shirt, the other had a “Police Lives Matter” laptop sticker. The women felt they had chosen the multicultural center in order to rile them. A heated row between both parties erupted, a video of which quickly went viral, threatening to upend the lives of all involved. For The New York Times, Sarah Viren, a journalist and essayist, explored the incident in the context of “the widening gyre of the culture wars.” The row at Arizona State was, she explained, “a symbolic fight,” one that raised questions of “wokeism” and “free speech,” the perils of viral videos, and the purpose of “safe spaces.” “It was a brief drama that was also a metaphor,” Ms. Viren wrote. “But watching and rewatching that drama unfold from my computer, I kept asking myself: a metaphor for what?”

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0:00.0	So this story you're going to hear is about something that happened in 2021 at Arizona State University.
0:09.0	That theoretically might not have caught much attention at all. Only video of the incident was recorded on a phone.
0:17.0	And then it went up online. And it went viral.
0:22.0	My name is Sarah Verine. I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine and I also happen to teach at ASU.
0:31.0	This all began last year, not long after the fall semester started.
0:36.0	Here's what you see in the video. Two white male students are seated across from each other at a table in a large room.
0:43.0	It's the kind of place on campus you might go to for a meeting or to squeeze in some work between classes.
0:49.0	One of the students is wearing an anti-biden t-shirt and the other has a laptop with a sticker that says,
0:56.0	Police Lives Matter.
0:58.0	The video doesn't capture the beginning of the incident, but what you hear early on is one of the men asking what he did wrong.
1:06.0	Yeah, yeah. What I do wrong.
1:08.0	You have a better, you're offensive. Police lives matter.
1:13.0	What happens next is essentially a debate between the two men and the three students behind the camera about whether or not the police lives matter sticker is racist.
1:23.0	And whether or not the student should leave.
1:25.0	You are racist, you're stickers racist because police? That's a job. You can choose to be a police. I don't choose to be black.
1:34.0	Students behind the camera are students of color. They are arguing about the purpose of the room itself, which is a newly designated multi-cultural space.
1:42.0	We have to work for five years to be able to make this space.
1:45.0	We work for five years to build our most.
1:48.0	The video ends with the two white students leading.
1:51.0	Police lives matter is sacred.
1:54.0	Police lives matter is sacred.
1:55.0	Yes, it is. It's affiliated with white nationalists.
	...

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